Tag Archives: uber

Last week I had a quick business trip to Dubai and needed a taxi to take me to the airport. So I downloaded Careem, the app apologized it wasn’t available in Kuwait which was weird, so then I downloaded Easy Taxi, which said the same thing. Left me frustrated and I had to go through the old school method of finding a Taxi ad somewhere and calling them up.

I asked around and did some research, turns out the government have banned all Taxi apps from Kuwait, it’s always sad to see things go backwards in this country. Instead of finding a mutual method with guidelines where normal taxis and taxi apps can coexist, we instead just ban one of them and let the other work normally.

Update: One of the readers pointed app that two apps still work for her, Q8Taxi and Q8 Grand Limo. They’re either working because they’re doing it illegally, or they are a taxi company with an application, rather than just an application that aggregates 3rd parties to work for them.

I was visiting an Expo in Dubai yesterday when out of nowhere I find Uber has a booth. I asked them when will they launch in Kuwait thinking everything is almost complete but that was far from reality.

They told me they would need around 18 months and they haven’t yet evaluated whether it would be feasible for them to open in Kuwait considering it’s a small population and they would need government approval before doing anything. I guess for now we’ll have to work with EasyTaxi until Uber shows up.

Abdullah Al Shalabi, the co-founder of fishfishme recently announced a partnership with Uber, the multi-million dollar funded app that provides on-demand car service. So [fishfishme] would book you a boat and free pick up plus drop provided by Uber free of charge. He posted this hardcore photo of himself and I thought it was pretty cool. Too bad the collaboration with Uber is only available in Dubai.

For those interested you can find more about the offer on their blog [here].